Religion, Atheism, and Evolution with Jordan Peterson, Matt Dillahunty and Sam Harris

I got this epiphany at the 59 minute mark roughly, as an atheist I try to dissect and understand the ideas that particularly Peterson is presenting, because that’s what this whole event and debate really is about at the end of the day; what the hell does this seemingly rational person (Jordan Peterson), really think?

And this is my half-baked attempt to try to communicate what he’s saying. What we see as self-evident is not self-evident; all of the rational self-interest we currently have and by virtue our interest in others as they provide tangible value to us and everything we care about, it wasn’t always self-evident. And by some machination of human development and religious stories and teachings we gained a new, better idea through osmosis or even a more direct form of transformation.

For example, if a completely rational human being decides that the best course of action for them is to end their own life, I would think Matt would side with that person’s free will to end their own life; on the flip side, Peterson would argue in favor of preserving their life unless it was painfully self-evident that it should be ended. The main difference there is the subject in question could be completely rational in every single point they bring up and every single which way you look at this situation it may seem like suicide is the answer. And if you allowed that person to end their life, that would be the end of the story. But if you choose Peterson’s view and allow that person to live even when all they want to do is die, it may come up at some point that this person was acting irrationally and there was absolutely no objective way to determine that, other than force them to live past this rational feeling that they needed to die.

And the meta-point Peterson is trying to make, if I can use that word unironically, is that what we view as self-evident is not self-evident. What was self-evident to us ten thousand years ago was that our tribe was good and all other tribes were at our mercy, whether that means we get to rape them or murder them or enslave them. And that was the natural, moral way of things. That was the ‘self-evident’ world. You can’t use that term to escape immorality and enter a world of magical moral supremacy. Things we consider right now to be ‘self-evidently true’ will be wrong in the long term, objectively. The only difference between now and then will be the objective tools we’ll have available to ourselves to judge what is right and what is wrong. This is the definition of hubris, and that is one of the human characteristics that religious stories rally against. And that’s why Jordan argues for the validity of these stories, outside of the literal, physical, ‘scientific’ claims that exist in the stories as well.

To risk diluting the conversation by simplifying it, you really don’t know what you’re losing if you try to throw out religion; you might be throwing out the baby with the bath water if you don’t understand what the rest of the text is trying to say. There are lessons and morality that can only be communicated through the lense of a narrative, if you want a human to actually understand it.

Matt’s main argument is that we can find true objective morality regardless if God exists or not. Jordan’s assertion in the same vein of thinking, is that not everybody agrees what God is or what God actually does for us, other than be the thing you aspire to be. And through the lense of the Judeo-Christian tradition, God is the sovereignty of the individual, and all the other western values that we find ‘self-evident’ in our own lives. And I think Jordan’s point of contention with atheists in general is, nothing is really self-evident if you throw out the concept of God, because a vast majority of human knowledge has had that as the foundation of all of their subsequent beliefs.

When SJWs argue that all cultures are equal, they are arguing from the same moral principle that Matt Dillahunty is saying; since God doesn’t exist, we have to use rational thought to decide what is right and what is wrong; the problem with this concept is that anytime that specific human has a lack of knowledge in a certain area, they are far more likely to fail to be moral in that situation. Rational thought is subjective, until there’s an overwhelming consensus. But these overwhelming consensuses are far more difficult to actually reach than is plausible; there’s 1.3 Billion Muslims, there’s 1.0 Billion Christians, and there’s almost a Billion Hindus. Where’s the consensus there? How does a Muslim, a Christian and a Hindu decide what is objectively rational and therefore moral? How is a consensus generated there? And are you naive enough to believe that the only thing standing in the way of that consensus is religious dogma?

The fact is they can’t, because they view the world in a different way, based on two or three or an infinite amount of different fundamental views of the world thus, they have different definitions of what is rational and what is not. The world can’t be simplified down to these terms, because it’s far more complex than we give it credit.

I think at the end of the day, the religious argument that Jordan is making is not mainstream Christianity; I think that’s self-evident (ironically enough). It’s that religious stories regularly engage in this idea that we can’t know everything, and that there’s a power above us that knows more than us that we have to defer to if we are ever to know the concept of peace. And to think of that as a individual or an object is to misunderstand the argument presented. God is simply what you project your perfect self as. And to ignore that concept is to ignore your ultimate potential.

In response to watching this debate, I was recommended a clip from the most recent Sam Harris, Dave Rubin conversation that was clipped, in which Sam talks in response to Jordan’s argument in this debate. As a quick aside, I am quite impressed with youtube’s recommended algorithm. It seems to actually be fairly accurate, although that might be purely because I spend far too much time on youtube. I digress…

Sam has an issue with Peterson claiming that atheists are not real atheists, and therefore they are more religious or believe in god more than they realize. I think the problem with the way Sam Harris is thinking in this situation is that he is assuming that Peterson is a priest when he makes this argument, instead of being a clinical psychologist. Jordan has never once argued on the moral superiority of the bible, for instance. He’s never once said that in order to be a moral person, you have to be religious. But that’s the way Sam Harris frames his argument, assumingly because that’s the most comfortable way Sam feels in framing Peterson’s argument and subsequently arguing against it.

In the second half of Sam’s argument, he starts to try to deconstruct the hero myth itself, but saying things like, “Well, Luke Skywalker is a hero, right? But he was made by George Lucas, certainly not a prophet by any stretch of the imagination, this story was constructed within our lifetime, therefore, we know he has no inherent truth in his story. It doesn’t stretch back in our DNA, for instance.”

None of this is inherently true. None of this is self-evident. The fact that a seemingly unassuming movie in 1976 made far more money than it ever deserved and spawned a multi-billion dollar franchise which would be ludicrous to assume before the movie was ever released to the public, to assume that that in-an-of-itself is self-evident is harrowingly arrogant and illogical. And the fact that Sam presents this as his magnum opus as to why Jordan’s thinking is wrong is really telling.

I think at the end of the day, the world view that Matt and Sam are presenting is that given enough time to think about the world and our place within it, every single person would come out the same, they would come out good, if only they thought rationally enough. The fact of the matter is that’s dead wrong. And it’s dead wrong because of the underlying truth of human beings; we are not inherently good. We are generally speaking inherently evil, and that’s not a lack of thinking, it’s a law of statistics. If every human was left in a room alone to complemplate the universe with no outside influence, we would be more evil than good. I think Jordan’s point is that we have evolutionarily become better than we really deserve to be, and that’s because of religious thought and narrative. And regardless if it’s true in a scientific sense, it’s done far more good as a moral truth for our species than we can realistically comprehend, just due to the nature of time and evolution.

And to throw that out as if it means nothing, as if it holds absolutely no truth and we should just ‘think rationally’, well that’s just wishful thinking.

In response to this world view, I would submit this line of thought. So we have to admit at some point that there is an I.Q gate, so to say, to even begin questioning these ideas of God and objective morality and whatever. And that there’s going to be a vast, vast majority of the population that never even entertains the idea, whether because they are too closed minded or they simply don’t have the intellect to seriously consider it without getting lost in the nonsense.

And so, what’s the solution for those people? The people who can’t even create a rational worldview without a concept like God? How are they going to successfully orient themselves in the world with purely ‘rational thought’ if they can’t even think of the world without God? In acknowledging the concept that you ‘don’t need God to be moral’, you are admitting that you can deal with the cognitive dissonance of thousands of years of evolutionary science. The belief of God is in our DNA, purely from the perspective of the society that was thousands of years ago; they murdered people who didn’t believe in God. If you were genetically predisposed to not believe in God, you were a genetic anomaly, not the rational product of human society.